Message #164234

[Athena Nike]

Another study in 2006 looked at perhaps the most important climate feedback there is. Yet it went unreported - so listen up. The Earth has been a very accommodating planet. During the past 200 years, it has absorbed more than half of all man-made emissions of carbon dioxide through natural carbon "sinks", mostly in the ocean but also on land. The rest of the emissions have been left in the air to aggravate the Earth's natural greenhouse effect, so raising global average temperatures.

But what if something were to interfere with these very useful carbon "sinks"? Can we forever rely on them to remain sinks, or could they turn into dangerous sources of atmospheric carbon? A huge international team of climatologists asked these questions in a little-known study published in the July issue of the Journal of Climate. The conclusion makes depressing reading.

The scientists investigated what would happen if they tinkered with 11 of the world's biggest computer models of the complex climate-carbon cycle. They wanted to simulate what would happen to the carbon sinks on the land and the ocean for each model as the world gets warmer. All the models agreed that as the world heated up, the ability of the land and the oceans to keep on absorbing carbon as efficiently as they have in the past 200 years gets appreciably worse.